Mortal Suns (47 page)

Nimi and Choras were at my feet, with the white dog, who now took notice only of them.

The soldiers had been positioned down on the lower deck. They were orderly and had polished up their gear.

Two slaves on the ship fanned the deck-house with leaf-shaped green fans. They were black, as the rowers were. There is a light strain, too, in Artepta, like malt or mahogany, even sometimes paler. But mainly you see slaves of this tone. And though at one time I thought I saw a noble and his company of this paler type, I was mistaken. The higher classes have skin like ebony. It came to me in Artepta, that Torca gained his blood from the higher caste. But Udrombis, whose blood had been mixed, was white.

So they rowed us downriver between the clashing reeds, the pale purple irises, where the water-lizards slid under the surface, disdaining us.

Then we saw wide fields, yellow and too ready, bending to the firewind, worked by black shapes whose scythes crackled with light.

In less than a day we came between two great statues, taller than the palace roof had been in Akhemony, sculpted of black granite that gleamed. They were so old, their form had become simplified, two giants, seated, their eyes up on the sky.

But from the stone lips of the right-hand statue boomed out the words sailors told one of:
Who passes
? And our ship flashed up its oars, saluting the statue which had spoken. Many believed, without this, it would not let us by. I did not believe it, however. With the death of hope had come the death of all wonder and awe. Magic belongs with life.

They gave me
a house on the north shore above the Straits, looking back to the mainland. It was a mansion, with gardens and fountains. In the morning the rising Sun blonded an image of white marble to the left of the house. At Sunfall another, to the right, of porphyry, became a blood-kissed rose. I had servants there, and slaves. I had a Maiden with coal-dark skin, highborn, whose ten-times braided hair fell to her ankles like ropes of black wool.

In this place I saw the winter come, as it does in Artepta, mostly windless and never really chill. But dry, in some cold fashion, dry as age.

He was kind to me. He visited me every day.

I had become a secondary wife, a Daystar.

And
she
—
she
was Calistra.

He said. “I’ve put you aside from
love
. I mustn’t taint you, now. Say you see it, Calistra.”

But that one thing I would not comply with.

The beat of the Heart of Akhemony had faded beyond the Lakesea. Some claimed still to feel it, hear it. I heard it in my ears as I lay unsleeping. The heart decides. A murderer, I loved him. Lost to me, I would not agree that he was gone.

Usually he entered the house at noon. He would frequently sit without speaking, smiling, as if to reassure me, at the floor. After an hour, he went away.

Sometimes I was given the speech of the god’s bond to him. Sometimes of the breaking of the bond on Sun’s Isle. Once, only once, he said, “He took the she-pig from me. Then the Sun Race. And then my Kingship. Everything.”

The sea here was louder; it came far in on the land, at particular times, day and night, or drew away. Crossing it, I had felt dizzy, half afraid, as if above some endless drop. It copied whatever shade the sky was. Over it, from the house, I saw huge Arteptan monuments along the farther shore, or risen from the waves, one like a lion with a serpent’s head, crowned. And three white towns lay out there, with mansions and gardens like mine, that sloped to the water.

I existed
for noon. I was extinguished after an hour. When he got up, and kissed me, I did not cling to him. I had never learned to importune, only to dissemble, a pleasing and dignified woman. Nothing improper.

Her name was Netaru.

At first, rooms were awarded me in the palace in the city of Artepta, and to Klyton an apartment near to mine. I never saw this.

We were treated like wished-for guests, given attendants, brought clothing, wonderful silks, and Arteptan linen that is thinner than gauze. At night, we dined in the palace hall. It was not like the halls of the northern Sun Lands, being open on pillars at three sides to the gardens. If the night turned colder, drapes were let down.

The Arteptans have canny acrobats, and their dancers would rival any in the world. There was always something to see. Sorcery was used too, now and then, as an entertainment, amazing things. Birds flew out of glass bottles too small to have held them, and flowers grew to twice their size, and turned another shade. One mage had trained a monkey to speak very clearly, with an accent like that of a child from a different country. By this, one saw their private sorceries, and those offered their gods, were profound.

There was a festival of Bandri, the birth goddess, and I saw the procession. There were male priests too, padded like the women with huge pregnant bellies. They say ejaculation in the male is also a birth.

If Klyton spoke at other times to the three kings, the Pehraa, of wresting back Akhemony, I never knew. Certainly he must have done. It had run off them, then, as the sea of the Straits ran off from the land.

The kings were men in middle years, Rhes the youngest of them, at thirty-four or -five—it was hard to reckon, for their calendar was not the same as ours, and their months of other lengths. The daughter of Rhes was the betrothed they had pledged Klyton, and despite dethronement, Klyton and she were apparently considered still hand-clasped, as they said, which made Klyton kin to them, and myself also.

In our presence, the Arteptans spoke the tongue of Akhemony. Klyton had asked to be tutored in the Arteptan tongue, at Oceaxis, but not spent much time on it. Now he asked for a tutor once again. It would have helped to fill his hours.

But I saw
Rhes’s daughter, Netaru, from the first night. She sat on the women’s side, among the black and stately princesses and queens. The wives of the Pehraa wore, all of them, helms of gold and silver, similar to that Udrombis put on for Klyton’s coronation. Netaru had only jacinths in her hair, which was not black, but the sheeny light brown of an acorn. Was this hair considered a lessening of her—and for that reason had they given her to Klyton? You could not be sure, with Arteptans. Besides, apart from her hair, she was so black her features, other than her eyes and lips, were hard to make out. And she was beautiful. The eyes one saw were long ovals, tapering at the corners and outlined with gilt, smoky white agate set with black. Her mouth was like a plum for color, and with the plum’s succulent indentation.

I do not think I was jealous. It was terror I felt. It was not immodesty but sense to know, before, I had had no rival. Though if we had been in Akhemony, his destiny unbroken, I think I would not have feared. And then, too, I would have prayed to the gods. If he loved me, he would come back to me … but all that was done.

Klyton behaved only as he should. He wooed her decorously. He showed that she was delightful, but that, as a prince, he did not dwell only on her. And he sought me every third night, although he never stayed long. Nor did he lie down with me. He talked of the god’s bond, and of Sun’s Isle. Or of the weather.

News had flowed, and Artepta learned, when we did—or rather earlier—that Amdysos had been crowned with an autumn crown in Oceaxis, his Queen beside him, in one ceremony, to spare him too much labor. Princes of Akreon’s line had uttered his words for him. Torca was one of the priests who officiated.

I visualize then, the Great Sun Amdysos, and his Consort Elakti, much as Udrombis had beheld them under the temple. Except the child is not on Elakti’s knees. Nothing was said of
that
, though Adargon had told Klyton the abomination was still at large, so it was reckoned, in the Precinct of Night. The priests left food for it, and went armed. It was sacred, yet profane.

In Artepta, they do not perform a wedding. There it is announced, if a woman of equal status goes with a man to his house, and stays a day and night with him there, they are husband and wife. And though a man may have more than one wife, in archaic times, they say, so might a woman, and their babies inherited through the maternal line, no one being sure of the fathers.

Since Klyton’s palace
apartment was his “house,” they had only to go there. For that reason too, the kings gave me the mansion just outside the palace, whose gardens fell down to the sea.

But I witnessed the Blessing. It was etiquette I should, being his other wife in Artepta.

There was a feast. More of their vegetable dishes and dark red beans with hot eggs served on them, and sweetmeats in the forms of all the gods, of which they had, Kelbaba once told me, a thousand.

Then Klyton and Netaru, with garlands of irises, went to her father, and he blessed them simply, the same words an Arteptan peasant uses on such occasions. And he gave her, as the peasant does, a small pot of perfumed oil, with which to make fragrant her new home. The pot was gold, of course, with a ruby stopper.

Klyton laughed and so did she. He looked happy, like a young man again. The way I had seen him so often, with me.

Before they went out, Netaru came to me, her ladies rustling after, and kissed me on the lips. A man’s wives must be friends and sisters. She smelled of dusk on a lily, and her skin peppery and enticing.

Together they departed to his rooms, and stayed there the prescribed time. Actually longer. By then, I was in my house.

After a few days, Klyton entered the house for the first of his daily visits. He seemed washed free of all of it, and I was gone with the rest. But when he had spoken to me for a while about silly, domestic things, I saw the dark sink through him, as it had come always to do. No, the grief and rage, the bewilderment and shame, had not withdrawn. Only the joy of the other life, the glory, only they had been dismissed. Though with these bright things, I, too. Whatever stayed with him, Calistra was not there at all.

But then suddenly he said to me, “The tears run down your face like the fountain outside the window.” So I was weeping and had not realized. I turned away, and he said, “Calistra, Calistra. I can’t take you with me where I must go. Don’t you see?”

Should I have cried out that I would not be parted from him, would lie at his door like a dog, and follow him to the earth’s edge, and down into hell? Once there had been that time of passion, when I thought him lost to me before. But now I could not say it. He did not want me, and unwanted I could offer nothing, even my life.

Klyton said, “Don’t cry for losing me. Be glad. I haven’t tarnished you. No. You’re like the fountain, more than your tears. Look how it overflows its alabaster basin, and pours away in a stream to the sea. It vanishes in darkness and runs underground in darkness, to return again to the fountain’s source, and overflow once more. This is you, Calistra. But I’m the fire. A burning jet, and now burned out. There’s nothing left. Let her have that, then,” he said. “She knows. She’s generous and kind from her indifference. She asks nothing of heart or mind. It’s what I need. All I deserve.”

When he had
gone I wept on for hours, but like the fountain, always more tears evolved. Surely
he
had been my source. I must only go back to him.

I remember looking so often from the windows of that house, at the slender strip of sea, at the gardens. White owls and sea-eagles nested on my roof, as in other high buildings and statues of the city. In the gardens I frequently saw Nimi and Choras at play with the dog. They were not despairing here. And my black Maiden told them stories. They had come to admire and trust her, as the dog had come to rely on them.

Without me, Choras would have had no life but for her penance in Thon’s Temple of misery. But then, without Udrombis, I also would never have come up into the day.

I could not imagine for myself any future. It was as if prophetically I knew my future would be unimaginable unlike anything I could ever foresee.

The winter moved smooth as cream. I exercised from long habit to the beaten drum of a musician girl, whose flesh was of the tone of brown bread.

She put me in mind, by her lightness, of a youngish man I had seen sometimes in the three kings’ hall. But his skin was not quite like hers, though resembling her unblackness, dark more in the way of smoke. He grew the hair on his upper lip. But some Arteptan men went bearded. Additionally, he dressed in finery, and gave evidence of military power—the way he stalked about, his manner, the sword cut on his left hand. One saw the soldiers of the Arteptans, who were of above average height, and each man’s breastplate crossed by the skin of a leopard he had killed.

The dark man did not seem, however, much like them. He had two servants, pale as he, sometimes others with him, also well-dressed. And he was treated with by the kings as a high prince, given far more subtle respect, in fact, than Klyton.

That I took
him for an Arteptan is not surprising; I had never seen before a man from Pesh Sandu.

At last, the orchard trees under my seaward window put on a sugar of blossom. They alone, of all the native trees, had lost their leaves. The other plants, and the palms of the garden, had only grown sulky and sombre.

Something in me, finding the blossom, catching or pretending a quality of spring was in the light, raised its face and glanced about.

I was young. I looked for something. If seasons transcend, why not other things.

That morning, I was aware of a great many ships out in the Straits, and faintly now and then some sound of horns would lift up to me. There was always trade, and business. I thought nothing of it.

At noon, Klyton did not come. That filled me with perplexity, and a fresh distress. Then a letter was brought, asking me to excuse him. Messengers had docked from the Benighted Isles, so far as he understood. Artepta would be winning to them, as she was to everyone. And he was, he said, curious.

Did something wake in Klyton too? Did he, hopeless and resigned, scent the spring and look about him, for some unthought-of chance?

A statue of an elder king, visible from my mansion, for it was the height of two houses piled on a third, let out its bell-voice to the Sunset, as it always did. And the porphyry beast in my garden flushed, then was the grey of ashes.